Summer Trip 2009 Part 4

The next day, both mom and I got up early again to roam the streets, mainly to look for a hutong.  We need to check one out since we are already in Beijing.  I told my mom I think where we went for our noodle stop on our first night after arrival, is also a hutong coz I saw a sign that says Something Something Hutong.  It beats going to the old Beijing, wherever that is.

By the way, I didn’t doctor up the pictures for this post.  Thus, you will see not so bright pictures.  That day was also very hazy and humid.

We walked to one hutong and asked the lady if we could look inside.  She was smiling and invited us in to look see.   The houses within hutong are very depleted, dirty but yet there are people living in there.  The rooms are so damn tiny.  Those with money, they renovated their place.  I notice there a lot of folks in Beijing have dogs – Poodles and Pomeranians.

And then I saw these:

My mom told me they are coals. They burn much longer than the ordinary coal. My mom said my dad told her that during one of their China trips.

Along the way to another hutong, we saw folks exercising below their apartments.

Kinda neat to see the various kinds of equipment.

There is a market, too along the street. We assumed it was a hutong residence before but turned into a wet market. It definitely was a wet market coz the smell cannot lari wan!

There are all kinds of stores from noodle making shop, tofu, bakery, veggie and meat stops, fruits and weird looking stuff sold in that market. All the noodle shops we see do not sell rice noodles, except wheat noodles. Blek!

We walked all the way to Wangfujing Street. It was a waste the day was so gloomy, everything seems to have a smokey affect.

Once we got to this street, we were looking for Silk Market. We got the chinese words out from the tour book, the book my sis thinks we weren’t using!! If only she knew….. Anyways, we thought Silk Market was around WFJ street. Low and behold after asking around, it is quite far from where we’re at. We managed to ask 2 young guys (we purposely pick the young-uns coz they should at least know a little bit of English) and he told he we can take a cab to Silk Market instead of taking the subway. So mom and I hunt down a cab and it was a nightmare. The cab driver we flagged down said we need to cross the street to get a cab. We did, flagged another down and that fella said we need to get one from across the street. WTF, man!! That was the first thing I mumbled under my breath. We got back to where we came from and saw a lady taxi driver. We asked her if she can take us to the Silk Market, she said no problem.

Driving out of WFJ Street, I finally saw the WFJ Bookstore, supposely the biggest bookstore ever.

And after a lot of lights and jams, we finally arrived at Silk Market. The lady driver was so nice, she stopped right where the underground pass is and told us to take the pass to get across. She is one of the extremely nice taxi drivers we encountered.

I had an impression the Silk Market was an open air market place. It’s in a building and the stores are like those in Thailand. This is where we bought souveniers – t-shirts for hubs, sis, BIL and our biggest purchased was the silk comforters. We were the comforter store’s first customer of the day, so they gave us very good discounts. Morever, the “hoi kah” (opening prices) at this store were 50 times cheaper than the one we asked at WFJ Street. I bought a “summer” and “winter” queen comforter for RMB800 (somewhere around that price). My mom bought a “summer” single comforter for my sis at RMB100 or less. It cannot remember what we paid for the three comforters but they were damn cheap.

Happy we finally made our silk comforters purchase, we took a cab and got back to our hotel to catch the train to Datong. Got back to our hotel, pack up and freshen up. Mom and I went downstairs to the noodle shop along our hotel and had our lunch of noodles and “sui kau” and also bought some paus for our train journey, and bade goodbye to the shop owners. The lady owner is so nice, very friendly even though we could hardly speak except to tell them “less salt and no msg”.

All of us checked out of the hotel around 12:30 and the hotel managed to flagged two taxis for us to get to Beijing West Railway Station. (My bro and gf went to get the train tickets on the day we went to Summer Palace.) The cab ride to the station was slow and misty. It had started to rain and it made the atmosphere even hazier.

The above picture I doctered it up, it’s the train station. It’s so huge with i don’t know how many levels. Well, we got to the station, the people were like black ants. Humans everywhere we turned to. bro asked the station information booth for our gate number. We got to our gate where there were no empty seat available for us. Not even a minute we got there, we were approached by the gate conductress. She asked if we want to pay RMB5 to a VIP waiting room. We all said yes, followed her, paid our dues and went into a nice comfortable seating lounge with nice lounge chairs, not as crowded as the gate we were suppose to depart.

After 1.5 hours, bro went to ask one of the train officers and said we need to board the train first since we are foreigners. Wah, special priviledge for “wei gor ren”. I think i got it right! So we squirmed our way past the flock of humans and got to our coach. We loaded our luggage first since we were there first. That was the only advantage of getting on board first. Shortly after, the huge crowd came into our coach. The noise and the smoking was crazy. The noise I can tolerate, but the smoking was ridiculous even tho the No Smoking sign on the coaches were redundant to the smokers.

The train left Beijing right on time at 2:30 p.m. The ride was not too bad. Mom and I chatted throughout the journey amidst all the other chattering going on. It’s actually not too bad if one can ignore the smoking and the noise.  Bro was pissed coz it was too damn noisy for him. When he bought the train tickets, he didn’t get the tickets where the four of us will sit together in a way where we sit facing each other.  The tickets he bought were we sit two on one side and other two on the next aisle which is a three seater.  Mom and I were find.  We were hoping the train will be a little looser but hell no, it was packed, every seat taken up.  Anyways, the ride to Datong from Beijing takes 6 hours.  We got to Datong train station at 8:30 p.m. on the nuts.